In recent years, the digital cameras have been widespread with great strides to excel the film cameras. In the digital cameras, the image data photographed is temporarily stored in a memory card mounted in this camera, and the recorded image data is transferred to a mass storage device at any time, making the memory card reusable. In this respect, the digital cameras are superior to the film cameras which employ a non-reusable film. However, the film has an advantage that it is purchased relatively easily and cheaply at a destination place. On the other hand, the memory card has the shortcomings that it is not always purchased anywhere easily, and is expensive.
Accordingly, the user of a digital camera needed to take some excess memory cards when photographing many images during the trip. Also, when excess memory cards were used up, more images could not be photographed.
Therefore, a camera has been proposed in which an image file is transferred to a file server by connecting a cellular telephone to the file server, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-307794. Also, most Internet Providers provide a service for allowing the user to utilize a disk space with a certain amount of capacity on the file server. In the future, it is expected that there are increasing business forms of lending out a part of the disk space on the file server.
However, when the image file was transferred via a network such as the Internet to the file server, the user needed to enter a telephone number and an IP address in order to designate a file server provider and a storage area (directory) of the file server available to the user, and then transfer the transfer files sequentially, which took a very complex operation and was inconvenient.
On the other hand, a disk space lending dealer was difficult to obtain many users because the dealer request a user complicated operations as described above, resulting in a problem of interfering with the business.